Wifi Direct for Scouting App

Technical Technical Discussion
1

I’m hoping to use Wifi Direct to connect two Android tablets to my laptop for our scouting app.

Another mentor has discouraged the use of anything wifi, noting that last year there was major trouble for someone who didn’t use it properly.

My understanding of wifi direct is that it causes a pairing between two machines without the need for an access point, and it uses a protected setup mechanism to negotiate the pairing.

I’m inclined to agree with his point, though, that any use of wifi could carry a whiff of suspicion.

Does anyone have an opinion? I’m truly dreading trying to make an Android tablet talk to a Windows7 service over Bluetooth.

2

I suggest that you look into Bluetooth pairing.

3

Any use of wifi at events is illegal.

T04
Teams are not allowed to set up their own 802.11a/b/g/n/ac (2.4GHz or 5GHz) wireless communication (e.g. access points or ad-hoc networks) in the venue.A wireless hot spot created by a cellular device would be considered an

4

Like the other have said, using Wifi at events violates the rules. I suggest looking into which bluetooth profiles are supported by the tablets and computer, and choosing the one which fits your needs.

5

I highly discourage the use of wifi or device to device pairing for the same reasons your mentor has previously discussed…

6

Last year our team developed an Android application for scouting and we use Bluetooth to sync the android tablets to the central data processing application running on a Windows XP laptop. We initially purchased a sync software package to handle the sync, but it really wasn’t terribly reliable and we ended up writing our own transfer mechanism that has been very reliable.

This year, if we manage to find the time, we’ll complete a web proxy that will run over Bluetooth so that the tablets can access our web server directly at competition via Bluetooth.

On the Android, I found a good reference for a Bluetooth client that I used, and on the Windows side, the application itself is written in Python and uses the pybluez library for Bluetooth support.

I am happy to share any code with you. All the code is making its way up to GitHub in a week’s time, but for now send me a PM if you want to talk further.

KenSt